eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

January 2013

01/27/2013

This blog post is dedicated to my friend George Ryan and his
company, Hatchwise. Live long and prosper

Burt Folsom has an ax to grind with a number of the
textbooks that I have or presently use in teaching history. His is an
entrepreneurial friendly history of the era of American industrial expansion.
His argument, I think is legitimate. American history textbooks tend to
conflate all of the leaders of the American Industrial expansion into one
criminal class. Folsom does the student of this history the service of giving
each industrialist and key company its proper due by noting how it functioned
as a “taker” or a “maker.”

Folsom makes the argument that there were some “robber barons”
who were not robbers at all. They made money by providing people with the
opportunity to make money and they did it with intelligence, courage, risk
taking, and hard work. In another group, he argues, were a group of individuals
who made their money by manipulating the government and profiting from
taxpayers. The later were,

“in fact comparable to medieval robber barons, for they sought
and obtained wealth through the coercive power of the state, which is to say
that they were subsidized by government and were sometimes granted monopoly
status by government. Invariably, their products or services were inferior to
and more expensive than the goods and services provided by market
entrepreneurs, who sought and obtained wealth by producing more and better for
less cost to the consumer.”

Folsum argues that the conclusions
that history textbooks lead students to are often contrary to facts, or are
often unable to distinguish between the ways that different people acquire
similar levels of wealth and remuneration. In the course of the book, he looks
with more detail into the rise of these men of great fortunes, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Leland Stanford,
Andrew Mellon, and others. At the heart of his argument is this notion that
there may be ways of obtaining success and wealth in business that benefit a
society at large and others that act in a more parasitical fashion. “Political promotion of economic development
is inherently futile” says Fulsom,

“for it
invariably rewards incompetence; if incompetence is rewarded, incompetence will
be the product; and when incompetence is the product, politicians will insist
that increased planning and increased regulation is the appropriate remedy.”

Essentially, his point is that when the
government began to give subsidies to industries, they became all the more
interested in increasing them rather than in actually doing what needed to be
done to convince the actual “consumers” that their product was worth purchasing.
As these industries failed to provide goods and services people wanted, people
went to government to demand regulation. Take the steamboat industry for
example.

“With annual
government aid, Collins had no incentive to reduce his costs from year to year.
His expenses, in fact, more than doubled in 1852: Collins preferred to compete
in the world of politics for more federal aid than in the world of business
against price-cutting rivals.”

Ultimately Collins’ subsidized
steamboat services could not compete with the more efficient, safer, faster,
steamboats that Cornelius Vanderbilt was producing. (Think about this in terms
of public education or healthcare.) When Collins’ subsidies were removed, he
was totally unprepared to compete with unsubsidized rivals.

This argument can be clearly seen in
the history of the Union and Central and Northern Pacific railroads. The former
two were government subsidy based affairs. James Hill’s Northern Pacific railroad
was a privately funded initiative. Here is what Folsom writes:

“While some
of this rush for subsidies was still going on, James J. Hill was building a
transcontinental from St. Paul to Seattle with no federal aid whatsoever. Also,
Hill's road was the best built, the least corrupt, the most popular, and the
only transcontinental never to go bankrupt.”

“Since
congressmen wanted the [Union and Central Pacific] road built quickly, they did
two key things. First, they gave each line twenty alternate sections of land
for each mile of track completed. Second, they gave loans: $16,000 for each
mile of track of flat prairie land, $32,000 per mile for hilly terrain, and
$48,000 per mile in the mountains.”

“The UP and
CP, then, would compete for government largess. The line that built the most
miles would get the most cash and land. The land, of course, would be sold; and
this way the railroad would be financed. In this arrangement, the incentive was
for speed, not efficiency. The two lines spent little time choosing routes;
they just laid track and cashed in.”

“The rush for
subsidies caused other building problems, too. Nebraska winters were long and
hard; but, since Dodge was in a hurry, he laid track on the ice and snow
anyway. Naturally the line had to be rebuilt in the spring. What was worse,
unanticipated spring flooding along the Loup fork of the Platte River washed
out rails, bridges, and telephone poles, doing at least $50,000 damage the
first year. No wonder some observers estimated the actual building cost at
almost three times what it should have been.”

“The aid bred
inefficiency; the inefficiency created consumer wrath; the consumer wrath led
to government regulation; and the regulation closed the UP's options and helped
lead to bankruptcy.”

Folsom argues that it is vital to
distinguish between those who make their fortunes serving and those who make
them “bilking.” The Scrantons he argued obtained their prosperity by bringing
prosperity.

"Scranton's
founders, as entrepreneurs, created something out of nothing. They created
their assets and created opportunities for others when they successfully bore
the risks of making America's first iron rails. Without them, almost everybody
else in the region would have been poorer. The amount of wealth in a region (or
a country) is not fixed; in 1870, Scranton, Platt, and Blair got the biggest
piece of the economic pie, but it was the biggest piece of a much larger
pie—made so by what they cooked up when they came to Pennsylvania thirty years
earlier.”

“When the
Scrantons came to the Lackawanna Valley, it was a poor farming region with no
close ties to outside markets. In 1850, according to the federal manuscript
census, no one in the Lackawanna Valley was worth more than $10,000. In 1870,
after the Scrantons had established their city and their iron works,
thirty-three families in Scranton alone were worth at least $100,000; and one
was already a millionaire. Thousands of other families were working their way
toward better lives. The Scrantons' iron works and railroad were the means to
this end.”

“Because the
Scrantons did what they did, thousands of Americans had new opportunities in
life.”

“A lot can be
learned from the story of the Scrantons. The first lesson is that entrepreneurs
are needed to create wealth; when they succeed, others then have the chance to
build on what they started.”

As one former President of Standard
Oil said of John D. Rockefeller, when asked to explain his company’s owner’s
success,

"Well,
it is simple. In business we all try to look ahead as far as possible. Some of
us think we are pretty able. But Rockefeller always sees a little further ahead
than any of us—and then he sees around the corner!”

Folsom argues that Rockeffeller’s
genius for improving quality and lowering costs were unpopular with all those
who wished to compete with him. But that ultimately, the light that the public
read by at night, and that allowed them to live more productive lives
themselves came from that very ability. “Some of the oil producers were
unhappy,” he writes of Rockefeller’s Darwinian tactics for squeezing out the
opposition,

“but American
consumers were pleased that Rockefeller was selling cheap oil. Before 1870,
only the rich could afford whale oil and candles. The rest had to go to bed
early to save money. By the 1870s, with the drop in the price of kerosene,
middle and working class people all over the nation could afford the one cent
an hour that it cost to light their homes at night. Working and reading became
after-dark activities new to most Americans in the 1870s.”

His last chapter about Andrew Mellon
is particularly interesting in light of recent debates over getting the wealthy
to “pay their fair share” of the American tax burden. Mellon’s experience and
observation led him to believe that one could lower tax rates and increase tax
revenue. How? His argument was that people will contribute taxes up to around
25% of their incomes but that at that point, they begin to think of taxation as
a confiscatory exercise and fight back by withdrawing it from taxable endeavors.
There is, he was suggesting, a “phase transition” that takes place when you ask
too much of people who feel that they have given their “fair share” already
(whether you think they have or not). At the lower levels of the economy,
workers will stand to have their wages reduced only so much before they strike
and entrepreneurs will stand to have their taxes raised only so much before
they go looking for ways to hide their profits in in tax free safe havens. Mellon
argued that wealth was being diverted to tax free municipal bonds so as to
protect it from confiscatory taxation and that when that happened, the
government was forced to get the taxes from the middle class (who are less
adept at hiding it.

“When Harding
died in 1923 and Coolidge became President, Mellon found himself with a strong
ally to help break the Congressional deadlock. Coolidge studied the tax problem
and agreed with Mellon's conclusions. "I agree perfectly," Coolidge
said, "with those who wish to relieve the small taxpayer by getting the
largest possible contribution from the people with large incomes. But if the
rates on large incomes are so high that they disappear, the small taxpayer will
be left to bear the entire burden."

For Mellon (and Coolidge) “taxes had
to be slashed "to attract the large fortunes back into productive
enterprise." “The Progressives denigrated his achievements whenever
possible,” writes Folsom, “They could hardly dispute his results.” Thus, “On
one level, Folsom shows that the ‘Robber Baron’ school of historians of
American business enterprise was partly right and partly wrong but was unable
to distinguish which was which.”

This is history with an agenda. IF you
want better services at lower prices, let the markets determine who gets paid,
not the Congress or Parliament in the case of England.

“John B.
Thompson of Kentucky said, "Give neither this line, nor any other line, a
subsidy. . . . Let the Collins line die. ... I want a tabula rasa— the whole
thing wiped out, and a new beginning." Congress voted for this "new
beginning" in 1858: they revoked Collins' aid and left him to compete with
Vanderbilt on an equal basis. The results: Collins quickly went bankrupt, and
Vanderbilt became the leading American steamship operator.”

“Without
government aid to inefficiency, the Cunard Company would have been compelled to
adopt improvements in order to compete with other and more progressive lines.”

The
Myth of the Robber Barons does not suggest that there were none. It’s argument,
as articulated above is that history is generally more complicated than a
simple formula like “If you got rich, you cheated and someone suffered.” “To
sum up, then,” the book concludes,

“we need to
divide industrialists into two groups. First, were market entrepreneurs, such
as Vanderbilt, Hill, the Scrantons, Schwab, Rockefeller, and Mellon, who
usually innovated, cut costs, and competed effectively in an open economy.
Second, were political entrepreneurs, such as Edward Collins, Henry Villard,
Elbert Gary, and Union Pacific builders, all of whom tried to succeed primarily
through federal aid, pools, vote-buying, or stock speculation. Market entrepreneurs
made decisive and unique contributions to American economic development. The
political entrepreneurs stifled productivity (through monopolies and pools),
corrupted business and politics, and dulled America's competitive edge.”

“If we
seriously study entrepreneurs, the state, and the rise of big business in the
United States we will have to sacrifice the textbook morality play of
"greedy businessmen" fleecing the public until at last they are
stopped by the actions of the state. But, in return, we will have a better
understanding of the past and a sounder basis for building our future.”

Question
for Comment: Yesterday, I listened to a radio interview with my friend,
George Ryan. A few years ago, he was making $10 an hour at a lumber yard and was
unhappy with his job. So, he started a business. Today, he is what you might
call a successful entrepreneur and small business owner at http://hatchwise.com . His company no doubt
takes business away from traditional graphic art businesses and gives it to
freelancers all over the world. In short, he profits from saving people money
and giving people work. What is needed in the American economy (and education
system) for this to happen more often?

01/20/2013

“When I was a kid,” says Robert Miller (Richard Gere) “my
favorite teacher was Mr. James. Mr. James said world events all revolve around
five things. M - O - N - E - Y.”

Through the course of the film we discover that this may be
so.

First of all, I am not a businessman and I don’t play one on
TV. MY understanding of the term “arbitrage” is therefor and elemental one. The
verb, “arbitrage” as I understand it means to make a deal that involves
limiting risk by buying something and selling it almost immediately after. In
theory, if you buy at a price lower than the price you can sell something, you
make money without doing anything. Someone who is good at it knows when there
is someone out there desperate to sell something at below its value and also
knows there is someone out there who desperately wants to buy something so much
they will pay more than it is actually worth. A talented trader has the ability
to convince someone to sell low and buy high and for that reason they must be
able to understand why people spend money and require money.

In Arbitrage, billionaire
Wall Street investment mogul Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is at the center of
numerous “deals.” The movie focuses on the various “deals that he has to
negotiate, not simply on a business level but on the personal level of family
as well. Money is involved in all of his deals with his business partners,
employees, investors, and lovers but none of them are based entirely on money. None
of the people he makes deals with makes the deal simply for the money. There is
always something else they want, or something just beyond the money. In each of
the deals he makes in his effort to stay out of jail, he has to offer money and
something else. He has to hide his own desperation and exacerbate the desperation
of the “buyer” somehow. “The more time that passes, the more lies get told,”
his lawyer informs him. We see this to be the case in the unfolding of the plot.

The movie might make for an interesting case study in
negotiation taking a slow motion replay look at how he negotiates with his
mistress; with Mayfield, the man offering to buy his company; with his daughter
after she discovers the way that he has been altering the books; with the young
black man, Jimmy Grant, who bails him out of a jam at a crucial moment in the
film.

“What you did is way beyond the money,” Miller says to Grant
in expressing his appreciation with a two million dollar trust fund. “Nothing is
beyond money for you, Robert,” Jimmy responds, “We both know that.” “Buy the
truth and do not sell it” the book of Proverbs advises. Arbitrage advice for us
all. Don’t look for any heroes in this movie. There are none.

Question for Comment:
Have you ever sold something worth more than you sold it for? Or bought
something worth less than you bought it for? How were you induced to make such
a bad deal? What keeps you from doing so again?

01/19/2013

“I would rather be thought worthy
of [the Presidency] than to be appointed to it for well I know that no man will
ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” – Thomas Jefferson, upon being nominated
for the office.

I have been listening to Jon Meacham’s biography of Thomas
Jefferson, The Art of Power on my way
to and from work for the past few weeks. I have been struck by the interesting
themes that Meacham draws out of Jefferson’s life. He was, as it seems, a
person capable of maintaining high aspirations and goals while yet compromising
almost acrobatically in the means he applied in the pursuit of them. Jefferson,
over the course of his life, was willing to reverse himself so as to avoid
turning around you might say (a paradox). “So which was the real Jefferson?” Meacham
asks of his vicissitudes,

“the philosopher advocating the end
of binding laws or the politician who believed that we must be contented to
secure what we can get from time to time . … The likely truth is that these
competing Jeffersons were both real.
He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras. And sometimes he
thought differently more or less simultaneously.”

Before he took office and thus obtained the power to expand
the Federal government beyond Constitutional limits, he was a staunch opponent of
doing so. After he had the power to do so, he became more adept at expanding
Federal and Presidential powers than the Federalists (the party he accused of
doing exactly that to excess) had ever been. Before he became President and
thus responsible for maintaining order, he opposed the build-up of military
powers. After he became President and had to actually deal with raids on American
shipping in the Mediterranean, he was less hesitant to give himself the power
he needed to solve the problem. Ironically, he began to understand what
Federalists had been arguing all along. The Nation needed to have the ability
to command respect. “We ought to begin a naval power,” he wrote then,

“Be assured that the present
disrespect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring on insults
which must involve us in war.”

In other words, peace through strength but only when I am
the one wielding that strength. In the Federalist era, Jefferson was a staunch strict constructionalist, insisting that
the Federal government was a government of narrowly defined and circumscribed powers.
When Hamilton wanted the Bank of the United States to be funded by public
moneys and yet controlled by private interests, President Washington privately
asked Jefferson for his view on the bank bill’s constitutionality. In response,
Jefferson said,

“To take a single step beyond the
boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take
possession of a boundless field of power no longer susceptible of any
definition.”

When asked his opinion about George Washington’s Neutrality
Proclamation, Jefferson demurred that he did not think it was in the President’s
purview to make statements on national policy that were reserved for the Congress. In
Jefferson’s mind, the President was usurping the power of Congress to make
declarations on subjects relating to war or peace.

When the Federalists enacted legislation to stop people from
slandering them in the press, Jefferson was appalled. But he himself, when
President, felt unjustly abused by the press and longed for a way to shut them
up. “I have been sometime used as the property of newspapers,” he said. “I find
the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded is more acute than the
pleasure of much praise.” He opposed Hamilton and his band of Federalists as “tribe-patriots”
but later founded his own party. “Those destined for command,” he said, “had to
bring the floating ardor of our countrymen to a point of union and effect.”

That was precisely the work of popular leadership he argued.
And precisely what the Federalist party was doing.

Jefferson made
himself the arch enemy of the Federalists use of power, criticizing both their
means and their ends. And yet when he himself was faced with a national problem
as President (The strategic city of New Orleans in the hands of Napoleonic
France), he barely blushed to assume powers nowhere spoken of in his beloved
Constitution. “Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a
Constitutional amendment,” writes Meacham, “expanded the powers of the
executive in ways that would have likely driven Jefferson to distraction if
another man had been President.”

Jefferson, the man who opposed the idea of incurring a
National debt when that debt was being contracted by his political opponents,
was equally willing to take the country into deeper debt than it had ever been
when he deemed the object desirable. During the Federalist era, Jefferson wrote
to James Monroe “We are ruined sir if we do not overrule the principle that the
more we owe, the more prosperous we will be; that a public debt furnishes the
means of enterprise, etc. etc.” Faced with the possibility of acquiring the
Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, he changed his tune.

“Things were,” Meacham observes, “neat only in theory.” “It
was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is
seeking power,” he adds,

“The demands of exercising it once
it is won however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often
one of the first casualties of actually governing. . . . The man who had as
secretary of State argued against broad construction in the case of the Bank of
the United States found that his own powers as President benefitted from the
broadest kind of construction.”

In brief, Thomas Jefferson despised the notion of control
when he was not the controller. He was an opponent to preistcraft and monarchy
and would use the powers that they had always wielded to oppose them when he
could. According to Meacham, the primary differences between Jefferson and
Hamilton were to be found in their ends and in their styles, not in their
means. Hamilton and Adams believed that nature distributed its talents and merits
unequally and therefore justice required that men should distribute powers and privileges
unequally in accordance with nature. They thought the way to do this was to act
forcefully and overtly to protect the “rights” of the “righted.” Jefferson saw
inequality as primarily a consequence of privilege and resisted it at every
turn. But unlike the Federalists, he preferred to wield his weapons anonimously,
publishing his arguments through the pens of others, shaping National policy less
overtly through the medium of his “toadies” in positions of power. “Better to
work through allies in Congress than to appear monarchical” he confided to one
of his supporters. And he preferred offices, he said where he could “do its
duties unseen by those for whom they are done.”

Did he think that U.S. diplomats should be paid more for
their labors when he was an ambassador in France? He would not ask for more
money directly but attempted to speak to the government through Madison; “I
would pray you to touch this string with Congress with the utmost delicacy as I
would rather be ruined in my fortune than in their esteem,” Jefferson wrote
him.

The author of this biography neither defends Jefferson nor
overly condemns him for being a man with flaws, with inner inconsistencies, and
with elements of courage and cowardice. Meacham’s Jefferson is a man who’s
goals for America cannot be undervalued and whose attempts to bring us closer
to the ideal should not be forgotten. “Jefferson believed in forces that were
trying to re-establish the rule of priests and kings,” we are informed, “But he
was free to maneuver in matters of detail. Jefferson had a core belief but
tactical liberty.” “We must be content to travel on to perfection step by step,”
Jefferson had insisted. “He wrote beautifully of the pursuit of the perfect. He
knew good when he saw it. He would not make the two enemies.” “He longed to be
great …” writes Meacham, “He was both an unflinching political warrior and an
easily wounded soul. He always would be.”

There are a few passages of the Art of Power that may not fit nicely into a well-constructed
argument but I thought I would include them here as an example of both Thomas Jefferson’s
and Jon Meacham’s gift for expression.

Here, Jefferson writes of the American relationship with
Britain in words that indicate that he has a good understanding of human
nature.

“There can be no medium between those who have
loved so much. . . . As with lovers and intimate friends there can often be no
middle ground between engagement and estrangement. In the presence of passion
or of former passions, acquaintance is impossible. It is all or nothing. For
once affections have cooled it is very difficult to bring them back to a middling
temperature. In such cases, human nature tends to rekindle the flames to their
old force or consign them to perpetual chill.”

Here, Meacham describes Jefferson’s equanimity and stoicism:

“It was a gift this capacity to
maintain a placid exterior no matter how much turmoil. He was usually a master
of his emotion. One of his friends wrote ‘I know of no gentleman better
qualified to pass over the disagreeables of life than Mr. Jefferson, as he
makes his calculations for a certain quantity of imposition which must be
admitted with his intercourse with the world.”

Here, Jefferson explains his perspective on party politics.

“I am not a Federalist because I
never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of
men whatever in religion in philosophy or politics where I was capable of
thinking for myself. … Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and
moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there
at all, therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of Federalist but I am
much farther from that of the anti-Federalists [i.e. those who would have no
federal government to speak of at all].”

Of Jefferson’s tendency to live his life constantly in debt,
Meacham writes:

“Why would Jefferson, a man who
sought power over men and events, concede his power to creditors and continue
to incur debts when he was already so burdened? Part of the explanation may lie
in his tendency as he put it to take things ‘by the smooth handle’ and avoid
difficult personal choices. It was always easier it seemed to sign another note
and defer payment to another day than it was to face a stark financial
reckoning. Oddly too, his innate sense of control and place may have enabled
him to see debt as an abstract problem rather than a concrete one. He was part
of a family and class in which borrowing money and mortgaging lands was as much
a part of the culture as hospitality or hunting. The prospect of ruin was real
but in Jefferson’s mind, remote.”

Resemblances to features of recent Presidencies may be
instructive.

“Stockjobbing drowns every other subject” Jefferson said of
New York. Of the tendency of Congressmen to use political power for financial
gain and financial gain to obtain political power Jefferson wrote:

“Too many of these stockjobbers and
kingjobbers have come into our legislature or rather too many of our
legislature have become stockjobbers and kingjobbers.”

We might all in the 21rst Century say a heart “Amen!”

Ultimately Thomas Jefferson;
The Art of Power concludes that Thomas Jefferson spent his entire life in
fear of a rear guard action on the part of the forces of monarchy and tyranny. For
him, “absolutism was always just a step away.” He suspected Britain of and
conservative monarchists desiring to re-assert its control over a free people
and he “road shotgun” guarding our newfound civic and economic liberties from
precisely such a fate (whether it was real or imagined, we can only now
conjecture). “We must see it how he saw it,” says Jon Meacham, “Not as we know
it turned out.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever
reversed yourself on some issue that you once pontificated about? Why? Why not?
Is the ability to do such a sign of strength or weakness in a human character?

01/12/2013

“I will not cut for stone, even for
patients in whom the disease is manifest.” – Hippocratic Oath

There are, no doubt, multiple layers to the meaning of this
novel’s title. The main characters are all named Stone (Thomas, Marion and
Shiva Stone) but the title seems to really be rooted in a line from the
Hippocratic Oath. Its meaning at the time it was written was pretty simple; The
physician taking the oath was promising to leave surgery to surgeons. He was
promising not to try something he was not trained to do even if the patient
needed the service. It is interesting that Abraham Verghese is a surgeon who
has taken up the practice of writing. And it may well be that he understands
that surgeons cannot heal what only story tellers can heal. “Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery,” the novel’s
narrator says at one point in the book,

“but no
surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and
steel fail, story must succeed.”

In a sense, Verghese is “cutting for stone” himself – making
the attempt to heal someone’s pain through story rather than through surgery. And
it may well be that the “someone” whose pain he is trying to heal is his own. Early
in the novel the narrator, Marion Stone, writes,

“WE COME
UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond
starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I
grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent
wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit
this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession,
we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it
can. But it can also deepen the wound.”

I know from my own experiences of autobiographical writing
that the attempt usually both heals and wounds. Ironically, the main characters
in this novel, all doctors, all wound themselves or others in their attempt to
heal others or themselves. We are constantly confronted with this reality that
in life we often bring about healing and hurt no matter how much we try to
avoid the later. Explanations of how this happens in the novel would all be
plot spoiling contaminations of your reading.

I confess, there are moments while reading this novel where
I could feel the pain of my own life’s memories being brought to the surface.
And yet always there is the voice of comfort. Under the pain of Veghese’s
depiction of suffering - physical, emotional, spiritual – is the background
music of grace, whispered in the ear healing, forgiving, redeeming. Patients
are healed. Broken relationships are made whole (between Marion and his father,
Marion and his brother, Marion and Genet, Ghosh and Thomas Stone, Hema and the
same, and even between the living and the dead.) "Forgiveness works
through our ongoing willingness to give up certain claims against one another,”
says L. Gregory Jones, “to give gifts of ourselves by making innovative
gestures that offer a future not bound by the past." Cutting for Stone is a story of deep emotional injuries forgiven.

“I am forced to render some order to
the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened,
and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am,” says the
narrarator (and we assume, Veghese),

“Life, too,
is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when
you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

Each of the characters in Cutting for Stone comes to realize how they have been blind to
something, and have caused pain to themselves and others by being so. Healing
comes when we learn to forgive ourselves and others for not being omniscient in
our youth, or even wise, or even something less than stupid. Thomas Stone
realizes but too late that a life that tries to replace love with work is a
mistake for example. Leaving his children was a mistake. Genet, Shiva, all look
back with regret. The only people who don’t are the people who “wake up” in
time. But no one is so lucky that they do not live blindly for some period of
time. The characters of the novel speak with one voice when they encourage us
all to see what is important sooner than they did:

To see that one has a purpose:

“No, Marion,”
she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled hands rough on my cheeks.
“No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest
sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”

To see that we were made with a need
for others as well as God:

“What she
couldn’t bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and
uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She’d wanted to cling to him, to
cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the
Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she’d never
known existed.”

To see that we have a need to leave
part of ourselves to carry on when we die:

“As she bent
over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with
what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should
have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn’t that
the adage Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema’s second thought was that
she, deliverer of countless babies, she who’d rejected the kind of marriage her
parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world
and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that
having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the
closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some
house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that
lived on the bodies of men.”

To see that none of us can live out
another’s life:

“The key to
your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own
your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep
saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter,
always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our
omissions, become our destiny.”

To see that every moment of our lives
is either significant or has the capacity to be:

“If I hadn’t
come to America. If I hadn’t seen Tsige. If I hadn’t opened the door for Genet
. . . The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we
know it or not.”

What this book celebrates most is the character trait of
attention. Its heroes are the people who see actual people and not “patients”
as repositories of illness to be cured. It’s heroes are people who wake up to
what their wiser selves are trying to tell them.

“At times it
seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were
incidental to their work. Thomas Stone was different.”

Cutting
For Stone asks us all to be wiser – to realize how powerful is our capacity
to harm and heal with our words and actions and to take our responsibility as “surgeons”
so armed seriously.

Question for Comment:

“When you
look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you
see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic
nonsense matter the least bit?” Matron leaned her head on the windowpane. “God
will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary
Joseph Praise—“by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human
beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

“But there’s
another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this
wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all
fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much
unfinished for the next generation.”

How have you contributed to the volume
of brokenness in the world (whether trying to or not) and what are you doing to
bring healing to that volume of brokenness? What brokenness are you leaving to
another generation and in what ways are you empowering the people in your life
to be better healers of that collective human woundedness? In what ways are you still a broken person and where do you expect healing to come from?

01/08/2013

“The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who
cannot believe anything else, are both insane.” G.K. Chesterton

“How we behold determines if we hold
joy,” says Ann Voscamp. “Change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask
for nothing to change.” “Eucharisteo [the giving of thanks] always, always
precedes the miracle . . . All fear is but the notion that God’s love ends.”

Ann Voscamp’s message is one that most
churchgoers will have heard before. But rarely will they have heard it
expressed so eloquently and by someone whose voice can convey the message with
such authenticity. She speaks not as one born with the gift of trust or one
given such a life that trust came easily. Indeed, her book begins with the
story of her loss of trust. At the age of four, her life (and faith in a good
God) was shattered by the accidental and tragic death of her sister Aimee in an
automobile accident in front of her house. “The year when blood pooled and my
sister died and I, all of us, snapped shut to grace,” she writes, “And with the
laying of her gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.
Closed to any notion of grace.”

Eloquently, she draws the connection
between the “impossibility” of gratitude on that day as the origin of a “fall”
that she must now, as an adult, be “saved” from.

“Really, when
you bury a child—or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw—you
murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? A God
who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs
burrow through coffins? Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies
die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is
grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us
soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away.

No, God? No,
God, we won’t take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding
mess and I didn’t sign up for this and You really thought I’d go for this? No,
God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can’t You get anything right and just
haul all this pain out of here and I’ll take it from here, thanks. And God?
Thanks for nothing.”

“I wake and
put the feet to the plank floors, and I believe the Serpent’s hissing lie, the
repeating refrain of his campaign through the ages: God isn’t good. It’s the
cornerstone of his movement. That God withholds good from His children, that
God does not genuinely, fully, love us.”

“Satan is an
ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan’s sin becomes the
first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude.”

“From my own
beginning, my sister’s death tears a hole in the canvas of the world.”

“Losses do
that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears
through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere
we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.”

For Ann Voscamp, the quality of our
lives hinges upon our capacity or willingness to survive the moments of “hard eucharisteo” and to practice consistently
the art of frequent easy eucaristeos.
The habit of giving thanks must simply be practiced she argues and it must be
applied whenever we see beauty and whenever we see tragedy that we cannot
explain. Like any other motor skill, we have to ask gratitude of ourselves always
and make time to express it. And, this flow of daily gratitude must not be interrupted
by the notion that there are things that happen to us that do not come from the
hand of a loving God.

“I can hear
Him, what He is telling the whole world and even me here: this is for you. The
lover’s smile in the morning, the child’s laughter down the slide, the elder’s
eyes at eventide: this is for you. And the earth under your feet, the rain over
your face upturned, the stars spinning all round you in the brazen glory: this
is for you, you, you. These are for you—gifts—these are for you—grace—these are
for you—God”

“Though I
cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has
made me my truest self, “full of grace.” Doesn’t eucharisteo rename all God’s
children their truest name: “Loved one.”

“As long as thanks is possible,” she
argues, “then joy is always possible.”

“The greatest
thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it
means to live…. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for
everything. . . . Non-eucharisteo, ingratitude, was the fall—humanity’s
discontent with all that God freely gives. . . . Then to find Eden, the abundance of Paradise,
I’d need to forsake my non-eucharisteo, my bruised and bloodied ungrateful
life, and grab hold to eucharisteo, a lifestyle of thanksgiving. Might a life
of eucharisteo really work the miracle of the God-communion? I rise from the
chair. . . . There it is—the secret to
living joy in every situation, the full life of eucharisteo. Twice Paul
whispers it: “I have learned …” Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. Learn
eucharisteo—learn it to live fully.” . . . This is why I had never really
learned the language of “thanks in all things”! Though pastors preached it, I
still came home and griped on. I had never practiced.”

To rebuild this atrophied habit, the
author begins to keep a journal of her blessings, intentionally slowing the
busyness of her life so as to better appreciate the source of it and hence the
title One Thousand Gifts.

“When we lay
the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our
cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices,
life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The
clouds open when we mouth thanks.”

“And I see it
now for what this really is, this dare to write down one thousand things I
love. It really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me.”

No doubt thousands of readers have
absorbed the message and found it coming up against those events in their lives
that defy gratitude. We all have them lying in wait for us – daring us to see
them as something to be grateful for. “How could a good God have let me … How
could a good God have let them … How could a good God have allowed …?” And thus
do we “amputate ourselves, “hacking our lives up into grace moments and curse
moments” instead of seeing it all as grace. Ultimately Ann Voscamp would have
us look back on our lives as though we were already in heaven. “There are times,”
she writes,

“when we need
to drive a long, long distance, before we can look back and see God’s back in
the rearview mirror. Maybe sometimes about as far as heaven—that kind of
distance.”

And this brings me to the subject of
mysticism (for what is mysticism if not the act of putting ourselves in some
heavenly realm while we remain bodily planted in this soil of our material
limitations?) Ann Voscamp is asking us all to be mystics. The Bible, she
argues, it what makes this all a rational act but it is mysticism that we must
embrace if we are to be grateful often and always. “Mystical experiences
do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind,” writes R.M. Jones, “rather,
they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract
concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities.” What Ann
Voscamp does by journaling her blessings is precisely that. She has opted to make her faith concrete, ascribing all
goodness to God with the zealous fervor of an accountant.

“I want that
kind of crazy, happy joy, God. Jeans to the right, socks to the left. How have
I lost it in the growing older, duller? How to see the world again through
those eyes? To live in the wide-eyed wonder of a world that unwraps itself
grandiose and larger-than-life, so otherworldly? . . . Everywhere, everything,
Love!” . . . “In a thousand ways He woos. In a thousand ways I fall in love . .
. Mystical union. This, the highest degree of importance. . . . Is there a
greater way to love the Giver than to delight wildly in His gifts? . . . “With
each blessing uttered we extend the boundaries of the sacred and ritualise our
love of life. One hundred times a day, everywhere we turn, everything we touch,
everyone we see.”

It is no wonder that Ann Voscamp’s
book has left such an impression and filled such a void. It reverberates with
that Christian “call of the wild” – the call to return to the mystical roots of
a faith overburdened with all that is not mysticism. “Religion is
nothing but institutionalized mysticism," I remember Tom Robbins saying in Skinny
Legs and All (Not a book favorable
in the least bit to religion).

“The catch is, mysticism does not
lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize
mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the
mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.”

Question for Comment:

“Ah, it is the
fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then
it says there is nothing to explain.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak
the same language.”
― Meister Eckhart

When you look at your life, can you see a story of “gifts”
or is it a story of random luck and misfortune? How do mystics convince
themselves that they are not imagining? What events in your life remain the
greatest obstacles to your own ability to retain your trust in a beneficent lover
behind the curtains of it all? What events make it impossible to succumb to cynicism
and despair?